3 Ways to Live By Example

October 15, 2018

“My life is my message” Ghandi

Many of us are hungry for a change surrounding the conversation of mental health. We are emotionally exhausted as we hear about celebrity suicides and are heartbroken when we hear about someone who has take their life in our own community.

We are ready for a new social narrative around mental health and we often come back to the simplicity of pointing a finger and saying “someone else will do something about it”.

Mental health is about all of us and needs everyone’s participation. Mental Health has the capacity to bind us together, to unify us in an acknowledgement of another’s pain. As an opportunity to celebrate in another’s desire for joy.

The narrative of mental health connects all human beings.

Mental health is health.

Now we have all heard “monkey see, monkey do”. What seems to be a childish jig, actually holds a lot of insight into the power of our actions, the power of our ability to influence. This is the wisdom that marketing guru’s look to when they are choosing celebrities to use their product so that you will buy it.

Except we have been sold a fallacy.

The fallacy is that you need lots of money, thousands of followers, a nice car, a great job, a fabulous looking face and an amazing social media feed to be influential. Let us be explicitly clear:

You do not need money, followers, a nice car, a great job, a fabulous looking face, or an impeccable social media feed to be influential, to make a difference.

All you need is your life. Your life is your message. How you live is your message.

How can you make your life a message that nourishes the dialogue of mental health? Here are three easy tips.

1. Stop comparing yourself to others. There is no one out there better at living out your message than YOU. Looking over to compare yourself to what others are doing just wastes your precious energy that could be used to contributing to your message. You are precious, your time is precious.

2. Practice what you preach. Ask yourself the question, if there was one thing that I hope that the people that I love most in the world got to learn from me in my life time, what would it be? Live your life from there.

3. Be curious and believe in yourself. When you are always a student, when you always approach the world with a little bit of “I don’t know”, you create space for people to surprise you, for life to surprise you. When you are curious, you let go of expectation and really truly start to believe that anything is possible, and when you believe anything is possible, well than darn, you will most certainly believe that believing in yourself is possible, because it is.